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After last week’s exciting start to the season, Wednesday night’s episode of Survivor went a long way in establishing how the rest of the game’s tribal portion would play out.

So how exactly are things shaping up for the three tribes? Will the Brains tribe continue to over think themselves out of the competition? Here’s what happened during Wednesday night’s episode:

Brains

A week after watching last week’s two-hour season premiere, I am still in disbelief that J’Tia is still around. Seriously. I have never seen a player walk away from tribal council after irritating her tribe, dumping out 95 per cent of their food supply, and single-handedly losing a tribal immunity challenge within a six-day span.

Even at the beginning of this week’s episode, when Latasha explained to the tribe that she was planning to vote her off prior to Garrett’s public forum, I was still left scratching my head.

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Going into this season I honestly thought that the Brain tribe would emerge as the team to beat — after all, outwit comes before outlast and outplay in Survivor’s long-running slogan— but between this week’s episode and last week’s episode I really feel that I am watching the dumbest group of smart people.

Considering how the smartest move out of the Brains camp this week was an all-girls alliance forged between Latasha, J’Tia and Kass, I wouldn’t be surprised if they become the first tribe to have all of their members voted out of the game.

Brawn

At the Brawn camp, Sarah approached Tony by the fire late at night where he decided to tell her that he had been lying about not being a police officer. After learning that Tony has been a cop for 13 years, Sarah, who’s also a police officer, immediately decides to forge an alliance with him.

“Now that I know Tony is a cop, we have that blue blood going. And cop blood runs thick, so he’s loyal to cops and you better believe I’m going to sit by his side,” she said. “We are going to be partners in crime.”

While the alliance looks to be a match made in Survivor heaven, Tony wastes no time telling the cameras that he’s not loyal to anybody. It’ll be interesting to see how this relationship plays out into the merge.

Beauty

For the first time in a long time, it appears that the weather will play a major factor this season as all three tribes were forced to endure profuse rainfall and high winds.

Of each of the three tribes, no team’s morale was taking more of a pounding than the beauty tribe.

Jefra, a 23-year-old former Miss Kentucky, Alexis and Morgan were weeping under the shelter as LJ, Brice and Jeremiah did their best to keep their shelter intact.

While the entire tribe was huddled under the shelter, JL remembered that he had seen Morgan search the reef when they arrived to their beach on the first day and elected to find what he suspected was the hidden immunity idol.

Within minutes he found it.

“Who the hell looks for a hidden immunity idol in a typhoon?” he said.

Challenge

Unlike last week’s relay-race-based challenges, this week’s immunity/reward challenge saw each tribe scoop water from the ocean into a bucket that they would then have to throw to two other tribemates. Once the bucket reached the third tribe member, they would have to toss the water from their bucket, which their teammate would then have to catch and use to fill a container. Once the container was filled, it would release a ball that the tribes would then have to free from a maze.

The winner of this week’s challenge would win both the immunity idol and a number of comfort items, while the second-place team would win immunity and a tarp. Not bad considering the weather over the past couple of days.

As has been the case so far this season, the brawn and beauty tribes got off to quick starts, while the brains tribe struggled to work together. Although the beauty tribe was the first team to fill their container and get to the maze portion of the challenge, they were eventually overtaken by both the brawn and the brains tribe after a monumental collapse during the last portion of the challenge.

Beauty

Back at camp, LJ, who’s in an alliance with Jeremiah, Alexis and Jefra, came to realize that now may be the best time to eliminate Brice considering how much of a social threat he poses.

However, Jeremiah made an alliance with Morgan and Brice at the end of last week’s episode that quickly established him as the night’s swing vote — either he would stick with his original alliance and vote out Brice or backstab them and vote out Alexis.

“I’m just this country guy. I don’t like hurting anyone’s feelings,” he says, adding that the move he makes will help establish him as a leader in the tribe.

In the end, Jeremiah elected to vote alongside his original alliance and vote out Brice — which resulted in Brice giving Jeremiah one of the most epic stink eyes of all time.

While it was sad to see Brice go (I really thought that he would be a force to be reckon with after the three tribes merged), it did solidify LJ as a serious threat going forward.

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